Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Most animals spend all their time “eating, resting and mating”. They have very little free time. Until primates broke that trend. Since they lived on trees and plucked fruits from the tree (high calories), they got a luxury few species have – free time! Combine that with the fact that primates lived in groups, says Max Bennett half tongue-in-cheek in A Brief History of Intelligence : “Primates seemed to have filled their open calendars with politicking.”   Scientists believe that politicking that led to the Theory of Mind , the ability to model the mind of another individual. What is the other individual trying to do? Why? In politicking, being able to understand the mind of other players is an obvious advantage.   There are a class of neurons called mirror neurons . They get activated when a primate watched others perform certain actions. See the other one peel a banana, and the observer would salivate! What evolutionary use could these mirror neurons have served?...

During the discussions and debates on the key directions of the Constitution, the leftists wanted the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble. Others bemoaned the absence of Gandhian principles. And another set asked why a reference to a godhead was absent. Ambedkar opposed all of these. (“Socialist” and “secular” would be inserted decades later in 1976 via an amendment).   Part of the reason for opposing the above was that Ambedkar was sceptical on the idea of India even being a nation! Here is his statement on the matter: “In believing we are a nation, we are cherishing great delusion. How can people divided into thousands of castes be a nation?” It was a worry shared by many others, though they would replace “castes” with “languages” and other regional differences. Therefore, believed Ambedkar, we needed a Constitution for a state, the groundwork to establish a nation. Only then could we hope that we would evolve into a nation someday. “The sooner we realize t...

While caught in Bangalore’s infamous traffic jams, Pranay Kotasthane stumbled upon yet another example of the unintended consequence of policy actions. Once upon a time, it was common for large trucks to be lumbering through city roads at all hours, including inevitably peak hours. So those heavy goods vehicles (HGV) were banned inside the city during busy hours. “The goal is simple and well-intentioned: reduce congestion, cut down on pollution, and make streets safer.”   Sadly, even such a well-intentioned policy has side-effects. “While the big, regulated trucks are kept at the outskirts, the demand for goods doesn't just disappear. Instead, it’s displaced onto a shadow fleet of smaller, faster, and unsafe vehicles.”   One half of that shadow fleet consists of “repurposed” agricultural vehicles. “Designed for low-speed farm work, they are dangerously unstable on paved roads.” But the bigger threat comes from the other half – the illegally modified mini-truck...

Simulating the world. Or a particular scenario. The ability to do this has enormous evolutionary benefits. To understand why, consider a creature which cannot simulate any aspect, writes Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence . How would it learn anything? By trial and error. Costly in energy and time, let alone the risk angle.   But a creature which can simulate decently or better, well, it learns by “ vicarious trial and error” . Imagining what would happen with a choice rather than actually making that choice. So much more efficient and quicker.   A related aspect is counterfactual learning , i.e., imagining how things would have played out if a different choice had been made. Sadly, in humans at least, this ability has a side-effect we are all familiar with: regret . “We cannot change the past, so why torture ourselves with it?” Because it is an evolutionary habit that made sense for most of human history. For most of our species’ existence: “Such r...

Richard Feynman famously said: “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”   We are all familiar with that problem. Sometimes people use fancy terms to impress other. But far more often, what people are really doing is using the jargon of their field, as Seth Godin points out : “If it’s important, conceptual or frequently discussed, there’s probably a domain-based word that experts understand. The precision of a special vocabulary allows them to do better work.”   Godin agrees with Feynman in that knowing the jargon doesn’t necessarily mean one is an expert in that domain. On the other hand: “If someone doesn’t know the word for it, it might be worth investigating what else they ...

Dignity. There is that (in)famous incident of Gandhi being thrown out from the first-class carriage of a train in South Africa. It led Gandhi to write that Indians had “become the untouchables of South Africa”, says Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble .   It took a “real” untouchable, Ambedkar, to point out that the discrimination Indians faced abroad, while routine and condemnable, was a false analogy to what the untouchables faced in India. After all, pointed out Ambedkar, in South Africa, Gandhi was the boss of several white employees. He had whites as house guests, he dined with white South Africans, he owned property and handled significant amounts of money. Contrast that with what untouchables experienced and suffered back home, pointed out Ambedkar. Hence the charge of the false analogy. As Rathore says: “Only a visa got Dr Ambedkar out of this hostile land that was his homeland, so he could travel abroad, far from the dominion of Brahmanism, and only then enj...